NZ article/interview
Aha... this is an article boiled down from a much longer e-mail interview I did back when Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen first came out.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainme...
I'll have to see about posting the long version, if the journalist doesn't get it up somewhere I can link.
Ta, L.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainme...
I'll have to see about posting the long version, if the journalist doesn't get it up somewhere I can link.
Ta, L.
date
newest »
newest »
message 1:
by
Jon
(new)
Mar 03, 2016 01:12PM
Hey Lois -- long time, I hope you are doing well. Just got around to reading the book and really enjoyed it. Would certainly be interested in long-version thoughts on how it came about.
reply
|
flag
Jonathan wrote: "Hey Lois -- long time, I hope you are doing well. Just got around to reading the book and really enjoyed it. Would certainly be interested in long-version thoughts on how it came about."Well, if you scroll back through the last few months of my posts, there are several more interviews, of which this is long-ish --
https://www.goodreads.com/interviews/...
Also the Baen podcast interview.
But yes, if it doesn't appear elsewhere, I will certainly post the longer interview with David Larson here in due course. (A big chunk of it was about modern publishing economics, though.)
Ta, L.
I now make as much or more - every month! - from my [totalled] e-sales as I used to make every six months from my paper sales. I have no idea how long this manna from e-heaven will last but it's holding steady at the moment."I don't want to jinx it, but if my own reading habits are typical, I see no reason why it shouldn't continue indefinitely. I find I spend much more money on books since I bought my Kindle.
I almost always used to wait for mass market paperbacks, whereas now I almost always buy Kindle editions for full price when they come out (and in the case of GJRC, eARC for more-than-full-price). When you consider the costs of publishing a paper book, you and your publisher are probably getting at least 2-3 times as much money per book out of me now.
Though I have no idea what kind of cut Amazon takes...
I really enjoyed the NZ article! Do you have a large following there? I think you were there once to promote, is that correct? But it was before I discovered your writing, or I would have been in line to get an autograph (was a college student in NZ at the time). And now, you hardly do book signings anymore (totally understand, and like everyone else, I'd rather you were writing or culture filter-feeding as you put it, just a lost chance for me).Just as a curious aside, and maybe you can confirm this, but many many sci-fi books seem to refer to NZ, even if just in passing ... eg. in Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein, Valentine Smith's father was a New Zealander, and there have several instances in this when I've read sci-fi, I just wondered if this was a sci-fi writers' in-joke or something ...
Regarding the e-versions ... I do more "impulse buys" for my Kindle, but for the books I really want, I tend to have both. In your case, I got the e-ARC of Gentleman Jole as a treat first. Could not wait.
Chen-yen wrote: "I really enjoyed the NZ article! Do you have a large following there? I think you were there once to promote, is that correct? But it was before I discovered your writing, or I would have been in l..."I had a great trip to NZ in 2003, when I was invited to be writer guest-of-honor at the national SF convention in Auckland, and front-loaded some tourist time as well.
I can't say about mid-century SF writers' references to the country, but two guesses are that either the writer had met a New Zealander or two, possibly in connection with WWII, or that they wanted an exotic and faraway location to sound futuristic -- "Look! In the 21st century, the world will be so connected that even New Zealand will seem right next door!" Which... came true, pretty much.
Same impulse as all the mixed-ethnic names that pop up in SF of that era which, if you look at the credits of any major film scrolling past (or my own friends and followers list here on Goodreads), also came true.
Btw, David Larson is going to put up the nearly-complete text of that interview on his blog later next week, and I will link to it when he does. The original had ended up being nearly 5000 words, which is what happens when you start asking questions of a novelist; what ended up in the article were just sound bites from it.
Ta, L.
